Who is going to Blackboard World 2011?

Who is going to Blackboard World 2011?

by Don Hinkelman -
Number of replies: 10
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers

Who is going to Blackboard World 2011, which starts this week in Las Vegas?  

Las Vegas?  An educational conference in a gambling town?  Hmmm. Read about it here from one of my favorite bloggers: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/education/blackboard-collaborate-formally-launched-at-bbworld-2011/4640

I am a firm believer in learning from your competition, so I watch BB and Dokeos and other LMSs. They are learning from Moodle's success, and we should learn from them. I am not going to BBWorld2011 but hope someone is, and can tell us what they learned. Also I want to sign up for MoodleMoot World 2012. Where is that going to be? wink

P.S. Watch for Sharing Cart 2.1 (to be launched next week)

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In reply to Don Hinkelman

Re: Who is going to Blackboard World 2011?

by Derek Chirnside -

Don, another post that made me smile.

Canvas (http://support.instructure.com/index.php?title=Overview) is also some "competition" to watch for at the moment.  IMO.  Their 17 university tour to ask "What do you want in an LMS?" provided a lot of good will, a story that has been re-told and a big client.  They have done a few things right.

The old Bb had a slight "Take what we give you" attitude.  I'm not sure what the new Bb is really like.

Lets have the MoodleMoot World 2012 somewhere healthy, like the Grand Canyon, the Great Barrier Reef or Whistler.

-Derek

Sharing cart 2.1:  will do

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In reply to Derek Chirnside

Re: Who is going to Blackboard World 2011?

by Don Hinkelman -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers

Wow, Instructure (Canvas) is years ahead of Moodle. Just took the tour and the mobile/computer settings and rubric maker blew me away.

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In reply to Don Hinkelman

Canvas was: Re: Who is going to Blackboard World 2011?

by Glenys Hanson -

Hi Don,

Are you being sarcastic? I followed the link given above to Instructure / Canvas (http://support.instructure.com/index.php?title=Overview) and kept getting "There is currently no text in this page." and similar messages.

Am I missing something?

Glenys

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In reply to Glenys Hanson

Re: Canvas was: Re: Who is going to Blackboard World 2011?

by Derek Chirnside -

Sorry Glenys.

Remove the trailing )

http://support.instructure.com/index.php?title=Overview

-Derek

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In reply to Derek Chirnside

Re: Canvas

by Don Hinkelman -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers

>>Are you being sarcastic?

No, very serious. I was blown away by the rubric designer and the notifications master control panel--both very intuitive and powerful. Also I set up my own course in Canvas rather quickly (they offer free courses to individual teachers--something Moodle should do) and noticed how tightly integrated BigBlueButton is.

They make a big point that PHP is the language of 2000s decade and Ruby is the language of this decade. Is that true? I assume that means Canvas is done in Ruby not PHP.  Anyway, a beautiful interface that is not Flash. Also, they seem to be open source. How difficult would it be to port the rubric designer into Moodle?

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In reply to Don Hinkelman

Re: Canvas

by Glenys Hanson -

Hi Don,

Could you give us some direct links to the goodies?

Cheers,

Glenys

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In reply to Glenys Hanson

Re: Canvas

by Don Hinkelman -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers

Hi Glenys,

It is the same link as above: http://support.instructure.com/index.php?title=Overview

You will see three demo videos.  The first is a good overview and about 2-3 minutes into it you will see the notifications master control page. The second one goes into that in more detail. On the third demo (just below it) you can see how assignments are graded and see the Rubrics design page. On the main Instructure page: http://www.instructure.com/ you can make a course by clicking on the big button "Try Canvas Instantly".

Definitely very cool.

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In reply to Don Hinkelman

Re: Canvas

by Michael Penney -

They make a big point that PHP is the language of 2000s decade and Ruby is the language of this decade. Is that true?


I call FUDsmile They do say Facebook is from PHP and Twitter is from Rubysmile.  Ruby provides alot of built in shortcuts, but has issues with scalability. With all their millions I still get that "Twitter is over capacilty" message a few times a day - w/as I alsmost never see Facebook down or even slow (even back when they were no richer than Twitter is nowsmile). Wikipedia regularly serves over 60,000,000 unique visitors/day on a shoe string budget.

Anyway, Ruby doesn't make a good Rubric designer module,  to do that you need a team, time, and a budget, with an educator to say what and how it should work, a system architect and UI designer to create a mockup and specification, coder(s) to build it as close to the design spec as she/he can get in the number of hours they can afford, and a project manager to keep the whole thing on track.

The hard part is not choosing the "right" server side scripting language,  most of the front end 'oooohs', 'ahhs', drags, drops, shades and fades are fron AJAX toolkits like Dojo and jQuery that work happily with PHP, Python, Ruby, even asp.NETwink. The hard part is getting a good team together and keeping them funded and on track from start to completion. O and good coffee, keep it comingsmile.

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In reply to Michael Penney

Re: Canvas

by Don Hinkelman -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers

Thanks, Michael, this is very helpful. So you're saying the beautiful rubric design module in Canvas was *not* done in Ruby per se, but rather through an AJAX toolkit like Dojo or jQuery, which can be applied to PHP as well.  Did I summarize that right? That means I could duplicate the lovely curves, fades, shades, drags and drops right here in Moodle with the tools you mentioned.

Actually, as a project manager, I have built a rubric designer for Moodle 1.7 before, in the assessment section of the Project Module. However, the interface was so bad, I lost interest and moved on to other projects. I agree about the difficulties of funding and design, and have been successful in some cases even with extremely limited funding. Probably due to really good coffee. Watch for the Sharing Cart 2.1--now approaching its fourth year! Very popular but definitely needing some pro UI design advice.

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In reply to Don Hinkelman

Re: Who is going to Blackboard World 2011?

by ben reynolds -

I've got a compatriot from my uni there now. I assume I'll see the Twitter hashtag shortly, and will pass it on to you want to follow the back channel. Follow me @thebenreynolds, or I'll just post here, if I remember.

MoodleMoot World 2012 will be held in Nice next summer. I'm bringing the yacht and the BlackBorg goon squad. You bring the jeraboams of champers.

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